The recent discourse on modernizing organizations and leadership has often placed a strong emphasis on values and ethics. This article elaborates on the benefits and challenges in the integration of values into leadership and organizational actions, most notably in regards to appraisals of values-based leadership (VBL). It is proposed that if the critical success factors and the challenges in i...

In an organizational context the norms that apply to an agent depend on the roles he holds in the organization. The deontic characterization of structural roles is defined when the organization is created. But an organization is not a static entity. Among the dynamic phenomena that occur in an organization there are interactions between agents consisting in a transference of obligations or perm...

In this paper we propose a self-organizing mechanism to model adaptive multi-agent systems. The mechanism is inspired in a psychological approach of motivation. Under this approach motivation is an internal state or condition that serves to activate or energize behavior and give it direction. Thus, we propose an intrinsic motivation or reason for engaging in a particular behavior called goal-ac...

In this paper we generalize and improve the multiscale organization of graphs by introducing a new measure that quantifies the “closeness” between two nodes. The calculation of the measure is linear in the number of edges in the graph and involves just a small number of relaxation sweeps. A similar notion of distance is then calculated and used at each coarser level. We demonstrate the use of t...

Adding to the increasing complexity and ambiguity in products and customer values, the sudden rise in the clockspeed of business operations is forcing existing companies towards a new organizational model, which autonomously integrates knowledge across technologies, functions, and clockspeeds to find optimal solutions. This thesis first analyzes clockspeed characteristics in terms of four dimen...

A new file structure for attribute based retrieval is proposed in this paper. It allows queries involving arbitrary Boolean functions of the attribute-value pairs to be processed without taking intersections of lists. The structure is highly dependent on the way in which the file is to be used and is uniquely determined by the specification of the allowed queries. Thus, for example, the structu...

With increasing amounts of audio being stored and distributed electronically, intuitive and efficient access to large music collections is becoming crucial. To this end we are developing algorithms for audio feature extraction, allowing to compute acoustic similarity between pieces of music, as well as tools utilizing this information to support retrieval of as well as navigation in music repos...

Virtual organizations are conceived as an effective mechanism for ensuring coordination and global goal fulfilment of an open system, in which heterogeneous entities (agents or services) interact and might also present self-interested behaviours. Organizations describe the system functionality, structure and dynamics. However, available tools rarely give support for these organizational abstrac...